This movie got rave reviews
in Sweden: “magic”, “delightfully goofy”, “fantastic adventure”, “thoroughly
charming”…It sounded so good that we were actually at the point of clicking on
“buy tickets” but something came up, time passed and we never made it to the
movie theater. No matter. We bought the DVD.

After this build-up it will
probably come as no surprise that it was a big disappointment.

In the first place I kept
falling asleep – not in itself an insult, as often mentioned on this blog I
have slept through some of the best movies ever made – but it certainly didn’t
help in trying to figure out what was going on. Even when I was awake I had to
keep asking Hal to rewind (no, that’s wrong, you don’t rewind DVDs but you know
what I mean) because he hadn’t caught it either. They talked so fast, jumped
from scene to scene with such jerks that we just couldn’t keep up. This can work
sometimes, but it didn’t here.

But the main problem was the
dead pan staccato, self-conscious “isn’t this a cute way of making a movie”
stylized formula. It wasn’t a question
of telling a good story (which it was) in the best way. It was a question of “I
have a cool, goofy idea of how to tell a story.” The form oppressed the content
– also not automatically a bad thing.
Clearly my fellow Swedes loved it. It didn’t work for me.

What I did like about it was
the fantastic house Bill Murray and Frances McDormand lived in and the use of
music. The best part was after the credits when the voice-over of the girl?
boy? couldn’t tell which – presented each instrument as it appeared in the
orchestral piece.

Maybe if I’d never heard of
the movie before so I’d no expectations, maybe next time (I’ll probably watch
it again someday) when I know what to expect, my rating would have been/will be
higher but right now it’s not the 5* of 5 I’d hope for but